Bear Den Designs

Short Story

I'm an electrical engineer with a career in hardware and software development.

Long Story

Up til 2003 my career in computers had been rooted in hardware. After graduating from the UF/UNF Joint program in Electrical Engineering, 1990. (The degree says University of Florida) I went to work for da Vinci Systems designing digital hardware. Many boards were designed, tested and brought to market for their 8:8:8 color corrector. I joined a separatist movement inside the company and we started our own company, AtLightSpeed, Inc. There, with a rag tag team from Florida, Norge', India and Indiana we built a reconfigurable computer that plugged into a Silicon Graphics workstation. It was very innovative and we shipped about a 100 boards before an exclusive marketing partnership with an evil empire, Avid , tore us asunder. We were dotcom bomb before the term was even invented. As Dick Cheney says about progress in Iraq say, "We are having tremendous success!" so too did AtlightSpeed.

So...with such a success under my belt...We sold the house, got married, bought a VW Vanagon Westfalia camper and traveled around the USA for 18 months. During this time I taught VHDL around the world and got a chance to live in London for 6 months. Balance Restored.

I went back to work as a contractor teaching perl and VHDL for Esperan (later purchased by Cadence ) and designing hardware for da Vinci Systems . At dv I helped design a board that went into their HD color corrector, The 2k.

I completed my first all software project for LMC using PHP and learned many good and bad ways regarding software development. Good: cvs,svn,perl,mysql,linux,bsd,mac,fsf Bad:php,windows

Next, it was back to dv for work on their film resolution image processing engine using not FPGA's but Associative Processing elements. The main chip was made by Aspex. I designed a PCI 66MHz, 64-bit card that had many of these chips on it and is used in their "Resolve" product line. This was fun but I got tired of traveling back and forth between their location and mine.

So, here we are. Having worked as a contractor for about 6 years I finally incorporated hired some guys to help and we are waiting with baited breath for your call or email.

Short Story

I'm a dog who likes to get up early and chase balls in Memorial Park.

Long Story

There really isn't a long story. I love to chase balls. Ohh... I also love cheese.

Short Story

I'm a problem solver with a background in mathematics.

Long Story

I graduated from Hofstra University in 1994 with a B.S. in mathematics and computer science, and from Dartmouth College in 1999 with a PhD in mathematics. I stayed on after graduating, working for a former student of mine as a researcher and lead software developer for the Center for Educational Outcomes.

While there, I wrote a variety of software in support of research on and teaching of the psychology of learning, some with rather unusual interfaces. Because the software was intended to be used while teaching, the user interface needed to be optimized for the benefit of someone who was just watching. An early beta of one application was profiled in Wired magazine ("Unwired U.")

I discovered Ruby on Rails in early 2006, and have been using it to create web applications since then; I met Chad at a training seminar and began working with him part-time shortly afterwards.

The last grant supporting my position expired in early 2007, so I'm now full time at Bear Den Designs

Short Story

I'm a programmer, interested in expressing ideas as code.

Long Story

I was introduced to computers at a young age, starting with an apple ][/e and a PC-XT compatible my dad had. My uncle showed me QBasic and from there my interest in 'creating' things on computers grew.

I have an A.S. Degree from Florida Community College in Programming and analysis, and plan to work towards a Bachelors and Masters and eventually, a PhD in Computer Science. When I'm not knee deep in code I enjoy 3D Modeling, Brain Games [Sudoku, Picross, Brainage], Drawing, Playing Guitar and Piano.

My main interests are expressing complex logic simply, and using random number systems to produce virtual realities. The idea is that given some basic instructions, and a random stream of data, a computer should be able to elegantly create a city or planet or even just a building. Using a method like this, the size of a game or virtual world would be limitless, without the man hours needed to create such a large environment. That and turning our whole Government into about 100 lines of code.

My previous work, and classes have given me experience with many languages like Java, C++, Python, SQL. I try to remain language agnostic and like learning new ones. Having said that, programming in Ruby on Rails is a real treat. It's an excellent web framework based on the Ruby scripting language, and it just works.

And remember kids, there are 10 kinds of people, those who know binary, and those who don't.